The photograph depicts Mitsuye Endo. At the time it was taken, circa 1944, she was incarcerated in an American concentration camp in Topaz, Utah. Of the four young Nisei—American-born children of Japanese immigrants—who contested the grounds of their incarceration at the Supreme Court, Endo was the only one who won her case, and unanimously at that.

As a daughter, granddaughter, and niece of Japanese American camp survivors, I have been reading about my community’s wartime incarceration for most of my life. But while Endo’s case is familiar to those in legal circles and Japanese American studies, her story is largely unknown by the general public. Why, I wondered, did I know so little about Endo herself, and why didn’t everyone know more about the case that helped lead to the closing of the concentration camps for all Japanese Americans?

When I was hired as the only woman on a creative team of four to create a graphic novel on one of the most important stories in the history of Japanese America, I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to tell Endo’s story. The graphic novel, which became We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration, pushes back against a dominant narrative about the camps: that Japanese Americans not only went there willingly, but stayed there willingly in order to prove their loyalty to the United States. We wanted to share a story of Japanese American resistance: not to the initial eviction, but to the unjust and unconstitutional conditions of their incarceration.

The widely known exceptions to the narrative of Japanese American compliance remain overwhelmingly male: the principled stances of Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Minoru Yasui, who took their cases to the Supreme Court alongside Endo; the collective organizing behind the Heart Mountain draft resisters, who refused to go from the camp to the U.S. Army; and John Okada’s novel, No-No Boy. Thanks to the work of scholar Mira Shimabukuro, we learned more about—and dramatized the story of—the Issei women who were important to the draft resistance movement. By also featuring a Nisei woman, I hoped to deepen the narratives about who was resisting, and how.

Layers of silence have veiled Endo and her case for years. As a scholar of Japanese American women’s literature, though, I know that silence has multiple meanings. Thanks to writers like Joy Kogawa and scholars like King-Kok Cheung and Traise Yamamoto, I know that silence can mean strength. It can mean a guarding of privacy. It can also mean refusal to speak on someone else’s terms.

And without question, Endo wrapped a layer of silence around herself and her case which proved that “concededly loyal” citizens could not be infinitely detained. She only gave two painfully short interviews about her case, one in 1976 and the other for John Tateishi’s 1984 oral history collection, And Justice For All. Her 2019 “Overlooked No Longer” New York Times obituary says that she spoke about her experiences with her children when asked, but they did not know about her case or its significance for years. She did not participate in the testimonies of the 1970s and 1980s redress movement for reparations. As historian Greg Robinson notes, “[Endo] represents an unusual case of heroism—a hero both self-effacing and effaced by others.”

In Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese-American Internment Cases, lawyer Peter Irons referred to Endo as “the recruit.” Compared with his other labels for the Japanese American litigants (Hirabayashi was “the moralist,” Korematsu “the loner” and Yasui “the legalist”), it’s a label accompanied oddly with a comparison to Issei picture brides: an arrangement based a gendered exchange of images. This label seems to have followed Endo’s case for some time, but it masks her own sense of justice and obscures the nature of the decisions she had to make.

Eleven years after Endo’s death, in 2017, I began working with my co-author, Frank Abe, to tell her story. Frank, who has been working on camp history for over forty years, was concerned that we wouldn’t find what we needed to tell her story, and it took us close to two years of research and interviews. Asian Americans Advancing Justice, who had produced a short posthumous documentary honoring Endo, connected me with her children. Eventually Frank flew out to the Midwest to meet them. There he made his own discoveries about Endo’s personality, including the confirmation of his hunch that Endo, like many Nisei, went by an “American” nickname, “Mitzi.”

That same year, through a bibliographic reference at the Japanese American history site Densho, I found an academic journal article by Elissa Ouchida. Ouchida shared Endo’s story through the eyes of one of her best friends, Janet Sakaye (later Janet Masuda). Only then did I learn about Endo’s participation in a lawsuit with 63 other wrongfully fired Japanese American State of California employees. I was excited; this tied Endo to a collective organized action. I also learned that a bad experience with one news reporter made Endo reluctant to grant interviews. But perhaps most meaningful was reading that Endo and Sakaye “danced around the room” at Topaz when they received the news of Endo’s victory. Here was a rare place not just of Nisei women’s voices, but Nisei women’s celebration.

Excerpt from We Hereby Refuse. Artist: Ross Ishikawa, courtesy of Chin Music Press/Wing Luke Museum.

Shortly thereafter, I requested copies of a folder of correspondence between Endo and her attorney, James Purcell, from the California State archives. Scrolling through the 25 electronic pages, I felt vindicated: Endo’s voice emerged with the quiet strength I had only sensed in summaries of her case. One particular exchange from September-October 1943 stood out. In late September, Purcell warned Endo that the government was sending a top War Relocation Authority attorney, Philip Glick, to offer her a plea bargain. If she dropped her habeas corpus case, the government would release her from camp. She responded by writing that because her case pertained not only to the Japanese Americans in the class action lawsuit, but all Japanese Americans who wished to return to the West Coast, she was willing to take it “as far as she could.”

In that moment I recognized my own Nisei aunties, who made many quiet—but not silent—decisions for a collective good. I thought of my oldest auntie, who was released early from camp to work in a dentist’s household in Beverly Hills, and once sent back her entire paycheck to my grandparents and the rest of her five siblings.

When Endo refused, she was concerned about her personal safety; in the same letter to Purcell, she wondered about the possibility of anyone returning to California with her, given the hostile climate she had left in her home state. Though Endo could have joined her sister in Chicago (who had already been released), she did not, and remained behind barbed wire for months. That delay allowed her case to move forward until her unanimous victory in December 1944. She was not released until May 1945.

Excerpt from We Hereby Refuse. Artist: Ross Ishikawa, courtesy of Chin Music Press/Wing Luke Museum.

The world may know Endo best from that photo at the typewriter, but now I also think about her dancing with her best friend—or sending the telegram I discovered in her correspondence with Purcell. Dated December 19, 1944, at 2:47PM, just after she heard the news of their victory, it begins with the words “extremely joyous.” So many photos of Nisei women in camp have a restrained energy, thrown into stark relief by black-and-white photography. But this was unabashed joy I could feel echoing through the archives and decades.

Young people today might need images of leaders and resisters who were committed from the beginning, who questioned authority from the start. But I can also appreciate that Endo’s resistance was complex: that she was recruited to a cause, but stayed faithful to it at great personal cost. I wanted to show what resistance looks like when it is not a raised fist. I wanted a human path to a human decision, not a lionized figure on a pedestal. I wanted to show that resistance is not always male—and it is not always loud. In Endo’s case, resistance looks like a quiet, ironclad devotion to a collective good. In We Hereby Refuse, we quote Endo’s voice from her lesser-known 1976 interview: “I showed people what I could do.”

The post Why Don’t We Know Mitsuye Endo? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Conceição crossed the Concentration Camp very quickly. Sometimes a voice would stall:
“Mistress, a little handout…”
She would take a nickel out of her purse and pass by, in a light step, running away from the promiscuity and stench of the camp.
What a cost, to go through that filthy trap of filthy people, of old cans and dirty rags!

This is an excerpt from Brazilian social critic and novelist Rachel de Queiroz’s first book Os Quinze. Published in 1930 and later translated in English as The Fifteen, it refers to the year 1915 when thousands of people fleeing a drought in the interior of the state of Ceará, in northeastern Brazil, were placed in a concentration camp on the outskirts of the state capital, Fortaleza.

Though little discussed today, in 1915 and again in 1932, eight concentration camps were built in the countryside of Ceará. Today, the rescue of the meaning and memory of such camps is more than a necessity. The camps of Ceará remind us how easily human beings who were considered undesirable could be discarded and isolated to avoid “infecting” the rest of the population and causing discomfort to the elites.

The stated aim in erecting these camps, or as they were known at the time, “poverty corrals,” was to prevent workers from poor regions from moving to the city, a phenomenon of great proportions throughout the Brazilian Northeast in the 20th century. Rural exodus was the result of the misery and abandonment, as millions of Brazilians—facing a scenario of malnutrition, hunger, and even death by thirst and starvation—were forced to give up everything in order to try a better life in the big urban centers.

But the retirante, as these people were called, were not seen as dignified human beings, nor even as a social problem that needed a solution. Instead, they were seen as a problem to be eliminated or, at best, hidden from the urban elites.

The genesis of the concentration camps lay in the Great Drought of 1877–78, the largest and most devastating drought in Brazilian history. It caused the deaths of between 400,000 and 500,000 people in northeastern Brazil—a massive impact for a country whose first census, in 1872, counted a population of just under 10 million.

The Great Drought forced mass migrations from rural to urban areas. All over Ceará, there were shortages of food and essentials and a surge in diseases such as smallpox. At least 100,000 retirantes arrived in Fortaleza, more than triple the local population of the capital at the time, overwhelming it.

In 1915, when another devastating cycle of drought hit, state authorities in Ceará were not willing to see history repeat itself. Instead, they resolved to prevent the arrival of those who trying to flee rural areas, and to remove those who had already reached the city center. The governor of the state, Col. Benjamin Liberato Barroso, created the first concentration camp in the so-called Alagadiço, a region on the outskirts of the capital Fortaleza.

Desperate retirantes sought to reach the capital by train—or even by foot following the railway line. Once they arrived in the capital, they were rounded up and sent to the camp, with the promise of work and, without any other option, they followed the orders. Those who had made it to the city center before the camp was set up, about 3,000 people, also ended up being removed to the Alagadiço where at least 8,000 people were crowded in makeshift tents living in less-than-ideal sanitary conditions.

The Alagadiço camp was dismantled in 1916 with the end of the drought, having largely succeeded in preventing the influx of thousands of people into the capital’s streets. The number of deaths resulting from the terrible living conditions in the camp is unknown, but the camp served as a model for the others that were organized from 1932 onward.

In 1932, with yet another major drought, seven more camps in Ceará followed the “success” of the initial venture. Two opened on the outskirts of Fortaleza, and others—at Crato, Senator Pompeu, Ipu, Cariús and Quixeramobim—lined the routes of the two main railroads that crossed the state.

These sites were strategic points on the migration routes of the people now known as flagelados da seca (“those plagued by drought”).

The purpose of the camps and their locations was to prevent people from reaching the capital, but they also were used as justification of “modernization” and “beautification” of the city based on the idea of social Darwinism or the “survival of the fittest,” meaning that certain people were innately better than others, and the deep-rooted prejudice that rural populations would be lazy and less productive, and thus, responsible for their own situation.

This time it was not the state, but the central government, which took charge of creating the camps. In a speech in Fortaleza in 1933, the dictator Getúlio Vargas praised the creation of the camps, where, according to him, 1 million people were being “served” and receiving government assistance.

In reality, the camps were created not to provide help to those in need, but to make the problem disappear from the cities—or at least to hide it for a while. By controlling entire populations, the local government aimed to avoid not only social upheaval, as in the Great Drought, but also social revolts such as the one that happened in Bahia between 1896 and 1897, known as the War of Canudos.

As with the Great Drought, reports about what was happening in Ceará in the 1930s were largely ignored by the Brazilian and foreign press. Inside the concentration camps, though, the picture was grim. Women and men were separated and could not leave except to perform forced labor on road and dam construction, under strong police escort. In many cases, their hair was shaved. The rules were strict, and those who disobeyed them were imprisoned in jails on site. The unsanitary conditions of the camps and the lack of food led to the deaths of thousands of retirantes.

In 1932 alone, it was estimated that more than 73,000 people were confined to these camps in inhuman conditions. The number of dead is unknown. In one camp, Senator Pompeu, it is estimated that at least 2,000 people died and were buried in mass graves. The total death toll for all of the camps may be as high as 12,000.

The inhumane treatment given to those seeking only to survive was not an exception and was not restricted to the years of great droughts. For retirantes who did manage to migrate, they were used as cheap, disposable labor, whether they fled toward the rich cities of the southeast, the rubber plantations of the north, the gold mines of Serra Pelada, or the construction jobs of Brasilia, today’s Brazilian capital.

By the second half of the 20th century, concentration camps were no longer fashionable. Even the military regime of 1965-1985 that tortured and killed hundreds of people did not set up camps. The idea of placing thousands of people in forced isolation in spaces with dubious sanitary conditions and without any legal process had been tainted by Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags.

Thus, when the greatest drought of the 20th century in Ceará occurred, between 1978 and 1984, camps were no longer a viable option. The government delivered food donations, but did little more to mitigate the worst effects of hunger and rural exodus.

At first, legacies of the camps were recorded in great books of Brazilian literature dedicated to analyzing, reporting, and romanticizing the consequences and the background of the drought in the Brazilian Northeast. Among them include Graciliano Ramos in Vidas Secas (literally Dry Lives), José do Patrocínio in Os Retirantes (Drought Refugees), Euclides da Cunha in Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), and De Queiroz’s O Quinze, which deals specifically with the concentration camps. This vast literature on the subject, which became known as the “Cycle of Droughts,” had been of immense relevance during the nationalist discourse prompted by the Vargas regime. The drought was also eternalized in the 1944 painting “Os Retirantes” by Candido Portinari.

Still, there’s a Brazilian saying that goes, “What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t feel.” Today, Northeast’s countryside continues to have development rates below the Brazilian average, periodic droughts are still common and a considerable part of the population depends on government aid to survive—which shows that the lessons of the past have not been learned.

There is scant physical evidence left of the camps, themselves, which were designed as mostly temporary structures, to testify to what happened there. Only in the small town of Senator Pompeu do the masonry structures still stand. Originally constructed by Norton Griffiths & Company to build a dam in the region in the 1920s, the buildings were abandoned for years until they were used for the camps, then abandoned again.

A year ago, Senador Pompeu’s town government turned the ruins of the concentration camp and its cemetery into a historical heritage site. There are plans to preserve the camp’s grounds, a way to the horrors of drought and the crimes committed there by the state—but testimony alone is not enough to prevent past mistakes from being made again.

The post The Forgotten History of Brazil’s Concentration Camps appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The result is that approximately one million Muslims, most of them Uyghurs—an ethnic group of around 11 million who are concentrated in Xinjiang, a vast western region of China—are currently held in what many sober, cautious people, with little inclination to hyperbole, are calling concentration camps. Though authorities denied the existence of these camps throughout 2017 and most of 2018, this became unsustainable in the face of testimony from former detainees and evidence from satellite imagery and official documents authorizing the camps’ construction.

One can only conclude, as a United Nations human rights panel did in August 2018, that Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are “being treated as enemies of the state based on nothing more than their ethno-religious identity.”

From interviews with people who’ve been released, it’s become clear that detainees in these camps (who also include Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities from the region) have been charged with no crime and are from no particular age, class, or professional demographic. The young and the elderly, farmers and teachers, the secular and the devout: All are being held in newly built or repurposed structures surrounded by barbed wire, reinforced walls, and watchtowers. Every moment of their day is controlled by the authorities. Former detainees have spoken of cramped conditions, sleep deprivation, interrogation, torture, and a sustained campaign of political indoctrination that requires them to denigrate religion, recite political slogans, and sing patriotic songs like “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Though some detainees have been released after a few months, many have been held for a year or more.

The Chinese state has justified the camps by claiming that they are not what they seem. In October 2018, Shohrat Zakir, the Xinjiang governor, described the camps as vocational training centers whose purpose is “to get rid of the environment and soil that breeds terrorism and religious extremism.”

The government says that the camps are the latest installment in what the Chinese authorities have called a “People’s War on Terror.” Since September 11, 2001, China has claimed to be fighting a domestic Islamist terrorist threat in Xinjiang, which it has tried to link with al-Qaida, the Taliban, and the Islamic State. In the name of combating this threat, it has built up an extensive security network that combines surveillance technology, digital censorship, and an intrusive police and military presence across the region.

Throughout my 10 years of reporting on Xinjiang, I have attempted to pick apart this tangled claim. While the details certainly matter, my overall conclusion is that the threat has been grossly exaggerated. Sporadic outbursts of violence against the state have taken place over the last three decades, but the overwhelming majority of these incidents are better understood as local, desperate responses to cultural and economic inequalities produced by government policy rather than “terrorist” acts. Even the most violent events in which Uyghurs were involved—the riots in Urumqi in 2009 that left at least 200 dead, the killings at a train station in Kunming in 2014, and the attack on a market in Urumqi the same year—had disparate causes and motivations. Both the West’s war on terror and the consequent rise in Islamophobia have facilitated the Chinese government’s policies in Xinjiang.

In fact, these repressive policies are an attempt to find a long-term solution to a “problem” that has nothing to do with terrorism or religious extremism, but stems from the history of the region and its peoples. The geographic boundaries of the area now called “Xinjiang,” or “New Territory,” only took shape in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Qing dynasty conquered the area—albeit partially at first. (It had been only loosely part of earlier dynasties.)

Even after the Qing took control, the area remained culturally and economically oriented toward the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Only with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 did Xinjiang become fully incorporated into China. Officially sanctioned Chinese histories today deny this by stating that, “Xinjiang has since ancient times been an inseparable part of the motherland,” a position that few Chinese historians held before the early 20th century.

Though the term “Uyghur” has a long history dating back to the sixth century, it’s been used to designate different groups of people whose attributes and fortunes have shifted with the flux of kingdoms and empires. In its current sense, “Uyghur” is generally agreed to be the result of political and intellectual debates within the region in the late 19th and early 20th century—what historian David Brophy calls a “palimpsest of Islamic, Turkic, and Soviet notions of national history and identity.” The term found purchase with the people in Xinjiang a century ago because it reflected a sense of shared identity based on common religious beliefs, social traditions, language and culture, and some degree of physical resemblance.

Uyghurs’ awareness of their deep roots in the region drives a strong sense of identification that takes precedence over contemporary notions of the “Chinese nation,” or “Zhonghua minzu.” Uyghur culture, traditions, and identity are the manifestation of this separate history.

It is this history which has now become problematic for the Chinese Communist Party. Even Uyghurs’ long attachment to the region, which the full name of the region acknowledges—the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region—has come under attack. Yasheng Sidike, the mayor of the regional capital Urumqi, wrote in a newspaper article that Xinjiang wasn’t the home of Uyghurs, but of all ethnicities, and opined that “the Uyghur people are members of the Chinese family, not descendants of the Turks, let alone anything to do with Turkish people.”

Across Xinjiang, particularly in the south, a sense of distinctness from the rest of China used to be both palpable and immediate. The blend of Uzbek and Turkish-influenced pop songs playing in shops, the smoke from lamb kebabs, and the painted adobe walls and ornate shutters of the older houses all evoked Central Asia.

It has thus been unsurprising that in recent years, as Uyghurs themselves have been subjected to more intrusive forms of monitoring and control by the state, their old residential and commercial districts have been demolished. The destruction of the tangible history of the region, coupled with the continuing influx of Han migrants from other regions of China, has been yet another way in which the state has sought to weaken Uyghur identity. As one Uyghur in Kashgar put it, “[j]ust look all around you. You’ve seen it yourself. We’re a people destroyed.”

Before the current campaign, the Chinese state paid lip service to the idea that some aspects of Uyghur culture were worth appreciating and preserving, though they remained suspicious of anything they perceived to have nationalistic or religious elements.

The Chinese Communist Party’s need for total control has grown far worse since Xi Jinping took control in late 2012. The official rationale behind the camps and other repressive policies in Xinjiang is that ethnic minority identity itself represents a threat to national unity and stability. Their aim is to “break lineage, break roots, break connections, and break origins,” so as to “strengthen interethnic contact, exchange, and mingling.” The ultimate goal is thus the assimilation of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other minorities into one “Chinese nation.” This concept has a long history in Chinese Communist Party discourse. The camps are arguably only the most drastic part of a long process of marginalizing Uyghur culture and identity, perhaps the most explicit of which has been the removal of Uyghur language instruction from the education system.

One of the most revealing aspects of the latest detentions is the large number of prominent Uyghur intellectuals, artists, and athletes who have been targeted, many of whom had previously been endorsed and supported by the state. The Chinese Communist Party is now so determined to eradicate Uyghur identity that promoting Uyghur literature or folklore is politically suspect. One impetus for this is certainly Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a program of infrastructure development and investment in Europe, Asia, and Africa, of which Xinjiang is “a core region.” Stability, or at least the appearance of it, is thus vital in Xinjiang.

Though there have been many waves of repression against the Muslim peoples of Xinjiang since the Communists took power, the pervasiveness and expense of the current campaign suggests it is intended to prevent the return of even the precarious (and often terrible) normality that existed before. While many of the current detainees are likely to be released at some point, the detentions won’t stop. The climate of fear, trauma, and suspicion created in Xinjiang isn’t going to dissipate.

Yet there’s also something naïvely ahistorical about the campaign. Previous targeting of minority culture during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) arguably only strengthened people’s sense of identity in the region, as did the banning of some Uyghur cultural practices in the 1990s. Beyond China, such colonial-scale oppression has often promoted cohesion and acts of resistance among the colonized.

The government’s approach does not seem like a blueprint for stability and national unity because the vast scale of this government persecution only underlines the differences between the Uyghurs and the state as a whole. The more likely outcome is that it will lead to the kind of violent opposition the government claims the camps combat, to which the authorities will respond in even more draconian fashion. They may well end up creating the monster they claim to be fighting already. And if they are willing to take such extreme measures now, the world should wonder how much worse their tactics may become when faced with the real thing.

The post One Out of Eleven Chinese Uyghurs Is in a Concentration Camp appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Likhachev was not the only person who recalled gifts of food during detention. While researching concentration camps around the world, I learned that even the memory of food helped sustain prisoners, linking them to distant friends and family and building bonds between detainees. Through interviews, written memoirs, and even archival “recipes,” the way in which imaginary feasts created community in places that were beyond hope came up again and again, revealing how even in its absence, food defines and shapes the most rudimentary forms of society.

Real food, of course, offered more sustenance than reminiscence could provide. But many concentration camp systems failed to feed prisoners enough to survive, and administrators wielded food as a weapon of control. Enduring forced labor as a teenager at Monowitz—part of Auschwitz—Elie Wiesel described hunger reducing him to “nothing but a body. Perhaps less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.”

Though his experiences were horrifying, Wiesel was fortunate enough to have avoided the gas chamber during selection. But extermination through labor—a combination of brutal work and deliberately limited rations—further culled prisoners assigned to the worst work details. Detainees died of gastroenteritis, pneumonia and a host of conditions that easily took hold as prisoners slowly starved to death.

In these conditions, access to additional food was critical. A post working in the vegetable cellar of a camp, such as the one German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann found in the Soviet Gulag in 1939, could provide a way to expand on the watery soup and bread typically allocated to prisoners. Buber helped to keep herself and others alive with stolen food.

Sometimes prisoners were buoyed by food from loved ones, as Likhachev had been touched by the present of a cake. Held with thousands of other suspects at the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, in fall 1973, Felipe Agüero recounted the joy of receiving a care package in detention, but also how the meagerness of what was sent—a few cigarettes or a little bread, maybe some chocolate—revealed that hard times had come for family on the outside, too.

Where they could not scrounge or steal real food, captives turned to their imaginations. Despite the most desperate conditions, concentration camp inmates routinely spent their fleeting idle moments discussing recipes. At Neuengamme, not far from Hamburg in northern Germany, after work in factories, digging in clay pits, or dragging rubble out of bombed-out streets, during the only time they had to try to remain human, detainees talked about their homes and families, their previous lives that had vanished forever, and their favorite meals. They had little else to live on. As the war dragged on, life expectancy for new arrivals at Neuengamme dwindled to 12 weeks.

Shared recipes preserved from this era of camps found improbable publication with In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. This 1996 compilation included a series of recipes that had been collected in the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt. A detainee named Mina Pachter had gathered recipes from inmates in the camp and given them to a friend to carry to her daughter, if he found a way to survive. After Pachter died, the collected recipes took more than 20 years to make their way into the hands of her daughter in New York, who eventually decided to publish the instructions for making such dishes as chicken galantine, liver dumplings, stuffed goose neck, asparagus salad, plum strudel, and chocolate torte.

The book was condemned by some who called it “sick,” wondering if cookbooks from Auschwitz or Treblinka would soon follow. The recipes themselves were often missing key ingredients or had completely mismatched measurements that made them useless. Others lauded the publication as Holocaust literature rather than a literal cookbook, a memory of how detainees consoled themselves in humanity’s darkest hours.

More cookbooks emerged over time, but not necessarily for publication. At the age of 12, in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, Nurit Stern listened to adults commune with each other. “Hungry people can only dream about food,” she explained in 2016. “I was a child. I didn’t know anything about cooking. I memorized the recipes and wrote them down.” The small notebook she cobbled together out of stolen materials ended up enshrining the women’s recipes—chopped liver, goulash, stuffed cabbage rolls, and cholent with kishke—for posterity in Yad Vashem’s archive. Stern explained the role the recipes played for people struggling to maintain their humanity. “These women used their memories and imagination to memorize this most basic experience… Many chose this way to protect their sanity.”

Nurit Stern made this recipe book as a child to record the recipes she heard adults discussing in the Ravensbrück camp. (The letters “FKL” stand for Frauenkonzentrationslager, or “Women’s Concentration Camp.” Courtesy of the Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection.

While recipes and fantasies about unlimited food helped detainees endure the everyday horrors of the camps, the issue of food has also been used as a tool of propaganda to keep the public from sympathizing with detainees.

During internment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War, a series of allegations about detainees being “pampered” in camps centered around food. One New York Times headline from May 1943 reads, “Wyoming Senator Asserts Japanese Go Unrationed and Have Vast Stores of Food.” While much of the U.S. was using ration tickets to buy food, Senator Edward Robinson accused detainees of hoarding meat and mayonnaise in the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, claiming they had enough supplies on hand to feed the camp population for “three years, seven months and fourteen days.” The actual historical record on Heart Mountain, not surprisingly, contains references to late food shipments in insufficient quantities.

The very idea of food for detainees remains a highly politicized subject—partly because detention is seen as a way to punish a targeted group, even when governments deny that punishment is the goal. In 2005, a group of political activists who saw reports on American torture as “military bashing,” assembled a book of their own: The Gitmo Cookbook. Gathering recipes for halal meals including curried eggs, tandoori chicken, and Lyonnaise rice that the Navy had developed to serve those held on the Cuban base, the book’s authors aimed to show just how well detainees in American custody were treated. Nearly a decade would pass before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report verified many of the worst accusations of torture and abuse of detainees.

Why do propangandists feel the need to ascribe gluttony, extravagant meals, or hoarding to detainees? Food is so basic to existence that our common need for it provides the root of our ability to empathize with one another. This empathy lies at the heart of how society functions. When propagandists want to show that those held without trial do not deserve empathy, or are abusing it, they use stories of lavish food as a way to further isolate detainees from society.

A similar principle is at work when prisoners take comfort from the shared ritual of imagined meals. Written and spoken recipes offer a performance of survival when survival is uncertain. They provide detainees the kind of social interactions that camps are typically created to prevent. Sharing the desire for a specific food prepared a specific way further takes the animal impulse to survive and transforms it into art, reasserting the shared humanity of both the teller and the listeners.

Food offers those closed off from society a way to resurrect its ghost behind barbed wire. In China’s Xihongsan Mine labor camp in 1961, prisoner Harry Wu recalled “food-imagining parties.” Inside stone barracks atop a tamped mud floor, Wu described how one person would take a turn, and the next night, another detainee would reciprocate.

Wu was himself altogether ignorant of cooking but joined in, using invention where experience failed him. Before going to sleep, inmates lovingly narrated the creation of a favorite dish, sometimes a secret recipe from childhood or something specific to their home province. “We would explain in detail how to cut the ingredients, how to season them, mix them, and arrange them on the plate.” Once the dish was ready to eat, the detainee would first describe the smell, and then the taste. Decades later, Wu recalled the spell that was cast. “Everyone,” he wrote, “would listen in silence.”

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Sato’s photo series, “The Go For Broke Spirit: Portraits of Courage,” which was exhibited earlier this year at the Go For Broke National Education Center in Los Angeles, records the images and shares the stories of many of these veterans. This is an edited and condensed version of a conversation between Sato and Zócalo.

I was born here in Los Angeles, but my dad’s side was from Hawai‘i. The Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i weren’t interned in concentration camps during World War II, because they were more than 50 percent of the workforce, and without them, the islands would’ve shut down economically. A few of my uncles, on my dad’s side, fought in the 100th Infantry Battalion of the U.S. Army. Some of them might have been in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, but they passed away such a long time ago that we didn’t get a lot of information. My portrait series is of veterans who were in the 100th, the 442nd, and the Military Intelligence Service.

On my mom’s side they were from Visalia, California, so they were put in a concentration camp in Poston, Arizona. So my family had both experiences: One side didn’t go to camps but they fought in the war; the other side was interned and lost their land.

I tried to get personal stories from the veterans. In Hawai‘i we call it ‘talk story,’ and it’s something where people are just hanging out, talking, and they start telling their stories, personal stories.

It wasn’t easy. I’m Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American. But for the Nisei—or second-generation—like my mom and my dad, it was almost universal that they didn’t talk to their kids about the war or talk about the camps. Some say it was too traumatic or it was too shameful. So all my friends didn’t know about this until we were much older.

To get the men even to take the photos was a challenge in itself. The best way I found to obtain their cooperation—what I called my secret weapon—was to find the one lady who all the veterans talk to. There’s always someone who’s just hanging out, drinking with the veterans. And they would congregate around her. And the veterans would do anything that she asked.

The hardest part was to get them to put the uniform on. Some still would not do it, and I can understand that. I’m lucky enough that when I was working in Hollywood, I worked with a lot of celebrities. I worked on movie sets, things like that. And they don’t give you a lot of time, nor did they give you a lot of input. So it’s kind of the same thing with the veterans. I study their faces and decide what I want to try and bring out, what I know of them. Are they proud that they made it? Are they reflecting? Are they sad for what happened? I remember one man was crying the whole time, and I got him to just kind of glance up. And that’s another thing with Nisei men: Very rarely do you get a lot of emotion out of them. They’re very stoic, especially with photos.

I spent a lot of time working on the feel of these pictures, and I did a lot of tests. Asian Americans were always portrayed as weak, or feeble, or goofy—never strong. What I decided to do was add a lot of contrast. For me, that adds strength. And for this series, I desaturated the photos and I did many layers of work. I didn’t want to make it too glamorous or too bright. It should be a somber mood, but strong. Even if the veteran is glad he survived, it’s still something that he had to go through.

There was one veteran I was talking to, and we did a little interview over the phone. And he said at the end, “Can I tell you something?” I said sure. And he went on to tell me that he was a medic, and how this soldier had died in his arms. And he knew the man, and he felt that if he’d done his job better he could’ve saved his life. And he said he’d never told that story. He told me he wanted to get that off his chest. And so he had never told that story for 70 years. He kept that inside him.

I hope this series will bring back that history, and let not only younger Japanese Americans—but all Americans—know that this existed, that the camps existed, that it should never happen again.

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News of a tent city dedicated to holding children in harsh conditions should evoke alarm, not least because child detention has a long and nasty history. For centuries, children have been used as pawns by governments seeking to control their parents or their leaders. And children have been forcibly relocated in the United States before. Under slavery they were separated from their parents to extort labor and build wealth, while Native American children were taken from their families for re-schooling and to foster the expropriation of land.

But the idea of holding whole groups of children in detention on a widespread basis—not as labor in a rapacious economic system or to steal land, but with detention itself as the point—is part of a newer phenomenon. And this more recent form of detention, the version that the Trump administration has embraced for now, sits cleanly within the tradition of concentration camps.

While writing a book on camp history, I defined concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done. By this definition, the new child camp established in Tornillo, Texas, is a concentration camp. While tragic, this is hardly surprising, since the innovation of concentration camps rose in part out of the willingness to detain children.

Women and children, together, constituted the overwhelming majority of the populations in the first detention sites publicly referred to as “concentration camps,” which appeared near the turn of the 20th century in Cuba and southern Africa. During a rebellion in Cuba, hundreds of thousands of women and children were driven off their land by Spanish soldiers, who destroyed their homes and crops, forcing them into miserable conditions behind barbed wire beginning in 1896.

American reporter Richard Harding Davis visited camps in three Cuban cities, finding detainees—known as reconcentrados—infected with smallpox and yellow fever in squalid temporary housing. He met babies whose “bones showed through as plainly as the rings under a glove.” Well over 100,000 Cuban civilians died as a result of conditions in these camps, a significant percentage of them children.

Concentration camps appeared again when the British forced families of rebel Boer fighters into tent cities in brutal conditions in southern Africa. It was understood at the time that the noncombatants were effectively hostages meant to get the men to surrender. A November 1901 letter to The New York Times about the British camps laid out the dynamic: “England, unable to conquer the Boer men, is striking at the women and children.” From the beginning, concentration camps targeted the most vulnerable.

Historian Peter Warwick records that in all, more than 27,000 Boer internees died, in the range of double the total number of combat casualties on both sides. Nearly 80 percent of the deaths in the camps were children. Segregated camps for black Africans had even worse conditions and less food, and ended up killing more than 14,000 detainees. In camps in both Cuba and southern Africa, atrocious death rates came not from massacres or gas chambers but from disease and starvation. Yet in these early camps, lethal as they were, most children remained with siblings and their mothers.

Later camps would break with that precedent in shocking ways. In the last years of the World War II, Germans took children from non-Jewish foreign parents upon arrival in the regular concentration camp system, the Konzentrationslager, sending them for denationalization and integration into German society. The children of Jewish parents were more often sent to the subset of Nazi death camps dedicated to extermination of Jews as a people; typically, they were murdered on arrival.

Jewish twins kept alive to be used in Mengele’s medical experiments. These children were liberated from Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the wake of the death of millions and the abomination that Auschwitz and other death camps represent, classifying any other type of detention facility as a concentration camp can now seem obscene. But it is a mistake to avoid the term. The phrase “concentration camp” was used for sites of mass detention of civilians for nearly four decades before the Nazis came to power. Even their gentler incarnations, such as the internment of military-age males during World War I, harmed internees, and helped to rehabilitate and institutionalize the idea of camps, setting the stage for more lethal models.

Even after World War II’s end exposed concentration camps’ horrors, the mass detention of children continued and evolved. Between 1976 and 1983, officials of Argentina’s military dictatorship detained thousands of adults and stole their children. Some detainees gave birth in a room of the torture center in the officers’ residence at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada in Buenos Aires, where detainees were interrogated and most of them executed, with hundreds of their children raised by pro-dictatorship families.

In Cambodia during the same era, the Khmer Rouge put children into forced labor camps, creating dedicated children’s work brigades. Elizabeth Becker, reporting from Phnom Penh, noted the shuttered schools and suspected some clandestine horror was underway when she caught a lone glimpse of “thin children, barefoot and in rags” carrying firewood near the highway. As a nine-year-old, Sopheline Cheam Shapiro had to dig in rice fields from dawn to dusk after losing her father, two brothers, and a grandmother, along with uncles and cousins. “I am no different,” she later wrote, “from most of my generation.”

Camps have often emerged at moments of crisis or in response to a social challenge, when societies are vulnerable to fear or division. Just as detention of children was meant to wear down Boer guerrillas resisting imperial rule a century ago, the detention of children today is meant to deter parents from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

These shelters may seem like a temporary solution, but irregular detention tends to persist and warp over time. The torture and extrajudicial detention that began at Guantanamo, Cuba, during America’s 21st-century “War on Terror” had roots in the treatment of Haitian asylum-seekers who were intercepted at sea and imprisoned on the base in the 1990s. HIV-positive detainees were segregated and held in such grotesque conditions (without access to adequate medical or legal assistance) that U.S. courts intervened.

Mrs. Shigeho Kitamoto and her four children, along with other Japanese Americans, were forced from their homes on Bainbridge Island, Wash., to an inland internment site, March 30, 1942. Image courtesy of Associated Press.

Concentration camps rose out of aggressive strategies intended for use in fighting guerrilla insurgencies. Today neither a war on the border nor even a civil conflict can serve as an excuse for this policy. Though there is plenty of military rhetoric, what we really have is a concentration camp policy wielded against refugees, which has devolved into a war on children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has already announced that the policy of separation alone is enough to do significant harm to children. This shift in policy has been sprung on a complex, already overburdened asylum and immigration system with a history of abuse. Under the best of leadership, the surge in children detained would mean overcrowding, sanitation problems, and physical and mental health issues. We do not yet know how many children will be unable to reunite with family members as a result of bureaucratic mix-ups, language barriers, and other issues. And things are unlikely to get better without intervention that ends the policy of separation. History shows that problematic detention practices become normal, and then they get worse.

We can already see the background demonization of refugee children in the pamphlet titled “Unaccompanied Alien Frequently Asked Questions” available through the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. It reveals both how strongly fears of foreigners have taken root in the United States today, and how the process of locking up children is turning them into targets. The first three questions cover what impact shelters will have on the community, whether kids are carriers of infectious diseases, and whether they are involved with violent gangs.

What is likely to come next? The historical parallels are already evident. As in the era of the Boer War, politicians are saying that detainees locked up by the government against their will are burdening American taxpayers. Asylum-seekers are blamed for bringing detention upon themselves, and more reprehensibly, on their children.

During the two-year existence of the Boer camps, mothers were blamed by British military officials and unsympathetic members of the public alike for the deaths of their children, said to be largely due to the ignorance and unsanitary habits of the mothers themselves. There was little acknowledgment of their involuntary confinement in dangerous conditions without enough food. And yet, it was obvious to early observers that this would not end well. In November 1901, an editorial in The New York Times cited the rising death toll in the camps, explaining that at current levels, “the Boer reconcentrados would be exterminated in less than four years.”

There is no need to see how much history is willing to repeat itself before stopping the current experiment.

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The earliest modern experiment in detaining groups of civilians without trial was launched by two generals: one who refused to bring camps into the world, and one who did not.

Battles had raged off and on for decades over Cuba’s desire for independence from Spain. After years of fighting with Cuban rebels, Arsenio Martínez Campos, the governor-general of the island, wrote to the Spanish prime minister in 1895 to say that he believed the only path to victory lay in inflicting new cruelties on civilians and fighters alike. To isolate rebels from the peasants who sometimes fed or sheltered them, he thought, it would be necessary to relocate hundreds of thousands of rural inhabitants into Spanish-held cities behind barbed wire, a strategy he called reconcentración.

But the rebels had shown mercy to the Spanish wounded and had returned prisoners of war unharmed. And so Martínez Campos could not bring himself to launch the process of reconcentración against an enemy he saw as honorable. He wrote to Spain and offered to surrender his post rather than impose the measures he had laid out as necessary. “I cannot,” he wrote, “as the representative of a civilized nation, be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence.”

Spain recalled Martínez Campos, and in his place sent general Valeriano Weyler, nicknamed “the Butcher.” There was little doubt about what the results would be. “If he cannot make successful war upon the insurgents,” wrote The New York Times in 1896, “he can make war upon the unarmed population of Cuba.”

Civilians were forced, on penalty of death, to move into these encampments, and within a year the island held tens of thousands of dead or dying reconcentrados, who were lionized as martyrs in U.S. newspapers. No mass executions were necessary; horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people.

These camps did not rise out of nowhere. Forced labor had existed for centuries around the world, and the parallel institutions of Native American reservations and Spanish missions set the stage for relocating vulnerable residents away from their homes and forcing them to stay elsewhere. But it was not until the technology of barbed wire and automatic weapons that a small guard force could impose mass detention. With that shift, a new institution came into being, and the phrase “concentration camps” entered the world.

When U.S. newspapers reported on Spain’s brutality, Americans shipped millions of pounds of cornmeal, potatoes, peas, rice, beans, quinine, condensed milk, and other staples to the starving peasants, with railways offering to carry the goods to coastal ports free of charge. By the time the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor in February 1898, the United States was already primed to go to war. Making a call to arms before Congress, President William McKinley said of the policy of reconcentración: “It was not civilized warfare. It was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”

But official rejection of the camps was short-lived. After defeating Spain in Cuba in a matter of months, the United States took possession of several Spanish colonies, including the Philippines, where another rebellion was underway. By the end of 1901, U.S. generals fighting in the most recalcitrant regions of the islands had likewise turned to concentration camps. The military recorded this turn officially as an orderly application of measured tactics, but that did not reflect the view on the ground. Upon seeing one camp, an Army officer wrote, “It seems way out of the world without a sight of the sea,—in fact, more like some suburb of hell.”

In southern Africa, the concept of concentration camps had simultaneously taken root. In 1900, during the Boer War, the British began relocating more than 200,000 civilians, mostly women and children, behind barbed wire into bell tents or improvised huts. Again, the idea of punishing civilians evoked horror among those who saw themselves as representatives of a civilized nation. “When is a war not a war?” asked British Member of Parliament Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in June 1901. “When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.”

Far more people died in the camps than in combat. Polluted water supplies, lack of food, and infectious diseases ended up killing tens of thousands of detainees. Even though the Boers were often portrayed as crude people undeserving of sympathy, the treatment of European descendants in this fashion was shocking to the British public. Less notice was taken of British camps for black Africans who had even more squalid living conditions and, at times, only half the rations allotted to white detainees.

The Boer War ended in 1902, but camps soon appeared elsewhere. In 1904, in the neighboring German colony of South-West Africa—now Namibia—German general Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order for the rebellious Herero people, writing “Every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot.”

The order was rescinded soon after, but the damage inflicted on indigenous peoples did not stop. The surviving Herero—and later the Nama people as well—were herded into concentration camps to face forced labor, inadequate rations, and lethal diseases. Before the camps were fully disbanded in 1907, German policies managed to kill some 70,000 Namibians in all, nearly exterminating the Herero.

It took just a decade for concentration camps to be established in wars on three continents. They were used to exterminate undesirable populations through labor, to clear contested areas, to punish suspected rebel sympathizers, and as a cudgel against guerrilla fighters whose wives and children were interned. Most of all, concentration camps made civilians into proxies in order to get at combatants who had dared defy the ruling power.

While these camps were widely viewed as a disgrace to modern society, this disgust was not sufficient to preclude their future use.

During the First World War, the camps evolved to address new circumstances. Widespread conscription meant that any military-age male German deported from England would soon return in a uniform to fight, with the reverse also being true. So Britain initially focused on locking up foreigners against whom it claimed to have well-grounded suspicions.

British home secretary Reginald McKenna batted away calls for universal internment, protesting that the public had no more to fear from the great majority of enemy aliens than they did from “from the ordinary bad Englishman.” But with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by a German submarine and the deaths of more than a thousand civilians, British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith took revenge, locking up tens of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian “enemy aliens” in England.

Tanauan reconcentrado camp, Batangas, the Philippines, circa 1901. Image courtesy of University of Michigan Digital Library Collection.

The same year, the British Empire extended internment to its colonies and possessions. The Germans responded with mass arrests of aliens from not only Britain but Australia, Canada, and South Africa as well. Concentration camps soon flourished around the globe: in France, Russia, Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Brazil, Japan, China, India, Haiti, Cuba, Singapore, Siam, New Zealand, and many other locations. Over time, concentration camps would become a tool in the arsenal of nearly every country.

In the United States, more than two thousand prisoners were held in camps during the war. German-born conductor Karl Muck, a Swiss national, wound up in detention in Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia after false rumors that he had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Unlike earlier colonial camps, many camps during the First World War were hundreds or thousands of miles from the front lines, and life in them developed a strange normalcy. Prisoners were assigned numbers that traveled with them as they moved from camp to camp. Letters could be sent to detainees, and packages received. In some cases, money was transferred and accounts kept. A bureaucracy of detention emerged, with Red Cross inspectors visiting and making reports.

By the end of the war, more than 800,000 civilians had been held in concentration camps, with hundreds of thousands more forced into exile in remote regions. Mental illness and shattered minority communities were just two of the tolls this long-term internment exacted from detainees.

Nevertheless, this more “civilized” approach toward enemy aliens during the First World War managed to rehabilitate the sullied image of concentration camps. People accepted the notion that a targeted group might turn itself in and be detained during a crisis, with a reasonable expectation to one day be released without permanent harm. Later in the century, this expectation would have tragic consequences.

Yet even as the First World War raged, the camps’ bitter roots survived. The Ottoman government made use of a less-visible system of concentration camps with inadequate food and shelter to deport Armenians into the Syrian desert as part of an orchestrated genocide.

And after the war ended, the evolution of concentration camps took another grim turn. Where internment camps of the First World War had focused on foreigners, the camps that followed—the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi Konzentrationslager—used the same methods on their own citizens.

In the first Cuban camps, fatalities had resulted from neglect. Half a century later, camps would be industrialized using the power of a modern state. The concept of the concentration camp would reach its apotheosis in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where prisoners were reduced not just to a number, but to nothing.

The 20th century made General Martínez Campos into a dark visionary. Refusing to institute concentration camps on Cuba, he had said, “The conditions of hunger and misery in these centers would be incalculable.” And once they were unleashed on the world, concentration camps proved impossible to eradicate.

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